Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Jonas, for his part, did not see what happened, to the car that is; all he saw was that the discus appeared to be on a collision course with the Mercedes, as if the badge on the car’s bonnet was a gun-sight and the discus a projectile shooting backwards — Aunt Laura had of course told him years before about how, in their ancient epic, the Indians regarded the disc as a weapon, a weapon capable of creating illusions, very much in the way of a diversion, stunning one’s foes. Jonas was therefore, not unwisely, well away from the throwing circle by the time Kvalheim climbed out of the foundered car; Jonas jogged lightly down the side of the pitch, pretended to be warming down after some hard tempo training, but when he cast an anxious glance over his shoulder Chairman Kvalheim was standing with his back to him, rooted to the spot, staring, as if he had just witnessed a revelation or something of the sort. Jonas jogged on at a brisk pace, out of the other gate, onto Grorudveien and home.

Late that evening he ran back to the playing fields; he searched for his discus in the grass bordering the ditch, on the road side of the fence, about thirty to forty yards beyond the throwing circle. He didn’t find it; it was gone. The fact was that he had never seen the discus land, and in his heart of hearts he began to think that it never had landed, that it had carried on out into space, that he had done the impossible, defeated gravity, that a Karhu was now winging its way to its proper home, in the constellation of the Great Bear.

A couple of days later there was the headline, emblazoned across the front page of Akers Avis (besides getting a small mention in the evening edition of Aftenposten ): ‘UFO over Grorud’, with a picture showing Chairman Kvalheim pointing almost proudly to the point in the sky above Ammerud Woods where he had seen the flying saucer, an elliptical object, disappear. ‘It seemed to be made of some shimmering alloy, and the bit in the centre glittered like a block of ice filled with gems,’ said Oddvar Kvalheim. And Oddvar Kvalheim was a down-to-earth man, the sort you could trust. But one should not laugh because this was at a time when otters were constantly being taken for torpedoes and a swan seen in the right light could very quickly become a sea-monster. Even in Nidaros Cathedral — this really takes the biscuit — supposedly sensible people saw ghosts: monks wandering about at night. So why not a UFO over Grorud?

But not even then, on the day the UFO story broke, could Jonas have said what made him throw. It remained a mystery, seemingly meaningless. The only thing he sensed, very faintly, was that his discus training was a preparation for something else. That there would come a time when he would need to use this pivotal action. That one day — possibly when confronted with something inconceivable — he would have to make the discus throw of his life.

Jonas confined himself to cutting out the piece in Akers Avis as a sort of trophy, a reminder of how much can be set in motion by a perfect, whirling throw. And perhaps one should not entirely rule out the possibility that this incident had some part to play in his decision — in the eyes of many an incomprehensible one — some years later, after taking his high-school diploma and sitting the university Prelim, to study the movements of the heavenly bodies, to begin reading astrophysics.

Finally — dare I suggest it? — there is always a chance that Jonas Wergeland may also have been mistaken: that there actually was a UFO over Grorud that day. Because as you well know, Professor, we are living in an age when reality is as fantastic as fantasy is real.

Is it possible to change a life by recounting it? If so, then we must look at the question of what can have lain at the root of the enmity that existed between Jonas Wergeland and Veronika Røed, these two cousins. The relationship between them need not have been of an incestuous nature, as some have hinted, although I don’t think this rumour was plucked entirely out of thin air either. To some extent they were, as their grandfather said when they were small, ‘spliced’ together. Their hate of one another was of the type that is only a hairsbreadth away from love, a demented kind of love.

The truth is that Veronika had been more or less in love with Jonas since she was very small, but not until the age of seventeen did she make a serious attempt to conquer him, really lay him low, quite literally. Sir William’s family, or what was left of it, had just returned from Africa after years of camouflaged exploitation of the natives — or, depending on how you look at it, of the Norwegian taxpayers — and even before the summer holidays that first year Veronika had made several expeditions from the new mansion on Gråkammen — built, you might say, with development funding — to her relatives in Grorud: visited them with remarkable frequency, although this sudden beleaguering of his person made no great impression on Jonas. Which is to say: he liked Veronika, had always been captivated by her — and at this particular time she also happened to be brimful of Blixenesque stories from Nairobi and the surrounding region. And yet there was something about Veronika that made him feel uneasy — no, not merely uneasy: afraid. She was too pretty, he always thought.

And his fears were not unfounded, as he discovered on Hvaler that summer, one weekend when the air was heady with the scent of the honeysuckle growing up the side of the house and they were alone out there at the mouth of the fjord, he and Veronika. Jonas still slept away from everyone else as he had done as a child, up in the little room in the attic. He slept soundly as always, and he slept in the raw, as always. On this Sunday morning he was woken by a faint clenching of his testicles, it felt as though someone had just clasped a firm hand around his balls. His duvet was gone. Veronika was standing over him, dark and smouldering, gazing down at his naked body. She smiled. Jonas had no idea what she was smiling at. Not until he tried to get up did he realize that his hands and feet were tied to the bars of the iron bedstead, bound with soft scarves, four knots. ‘Bowlines,’ said Veronika. ‘I could have chosen one of the trickier knots Grandpa taught us, but I like to keep things simple.’ She smiled again, teasingly, or was it desirously as she ran her eye over his body, as if he were a prize catch she had snared, rather like a unicorn. He tugged tentatively with one arm. ‘You’ll never be able to undo them,’ she said.

She kneeled on the bed. She smelled of sun cream. Jonas cursed the fact that he was a sound sleeper, as she brushed his belly with her long dark hair. Jonas didn’t know whether to lie back and enjoy it or put up a fight. Put up a fight? He was helpless, bound to the bed by colourful silks and soft knots; in one way he felt like an ornament of sorts, a bit of decoration, in another like a victim of torture, like you saw in pictures. But torture? Who could possibly regard this as torture? Veronika Røed sweeping her long, black hair across his stomach and chest, stroking a finger along his thigh, slowly, upwards.

Where are the dark holes in Jonas Wergeland’s life, the tales that are hidden deep down, like a ball of hibernating snakes, all potent and intertwined? She got to her feet and planted herself in front of him, gleaming black

eyes and gleaming black hair, looked down at him lying there with arms and legs spread, like a big unknown ‘X’. She pulled off the baggy T-shirt that covered her to mid-thigh, stood there before him in just her panties: ninety-five per cent summer-bronzed skin, five per cent white silk. From a purely objective point of view — this much Jonas knew — this ought to have been one of the sexiest bodies one could ever imagine, an almost timelessly perfect figure in terms of breasts and curves — classical beauty, as they say. Something told him he would never see a more consummately lovely body. And yet he said no. By which I mean, he said no with his eyes. And with his undercarriage. It was not fear alone that prevented Jonas from rising to the occasion but also, and to as great an extent, contempt. ‘You’ll never get it up,’ he said.